Ubuntu at Work
Posted on 2010-02-26 (Updated on 2019-01-24)
As of today, I'll be booting into Ubuntu at work instead of the usual Windows XP. I am psyched.
For the past month or so, I've been spending an hour or so after work building up a second drive on my machine. I think I started off with Crunchbang, moved to Xubuntu with a lot of pieces stripped out, and eventually settled on a Ubuntu minimal install with Openbox for a window manager. Tonight, I was able to get the last bits sorted out that make it a sensible alternative in an all-Windows environment.
Here are a couple tips I learned along the way:
- The Likewise Open packages in the Ubuntu repos will allow you to join your computer to an Active Directory domain, provided you have the user permissions to do so. But beware; in Ubuntu 9.10, this completely destroyed my ability to log into my machine with a local user through GDM, so I had to tear it out and use Getty & run "startx" to get to a GUI. There are alternatives, like qingy, but I didn't get very far with them.
- Lots of things are simplified if you set the default domain in your Likewise configuration. Since AD users are represented as DOMAIN\user, and a backslash is an escape character in unix-like systems, this makes commands and configurations awfully tricky. Simply logging in with your user name, and having Likewise assume you mean to log into your domain, makes things much smoother.
- Auto-mounting samba shares is a pain in the ass. I couldn't get it working without putting my user name and password in a plain text file, so I went for the manu-matic approach. I created a quick shell script that prompts me for my password twice (once for sudo, once for pasting into the mount options) and created a bash alias for it. The first thing I do when I log into my machine is open a terminal and type "connect", and that kicks things off nicely.
- I have a Windows XP VM around for annoying programs that don't have a FLOSS alternative or a native Linux port. There are so many crappy pieces of software that we use internally, some of which need IE to function, etc. Keeping a VM around with Windows allows me to run Linux for mostly everything while still being able to work on the help desk.
So far, things are going well; Ubuntu with Openbox is proving to be lightning fast and far out-performs my XP installation on the same machine. Hell, the XP VM runs faster than the native install. I'll keep posting tips and tricks I run into along the way, and who knows: maybe I'll save someone time in the process. Here's hoping!
Tags: linux troubleshooting